Pages

Monday, January 02, 2017

New books, bought in Taiwan, in the former native speaker's library

I bought these books during our somewhat shortened trip to Taiwan this winter break. (We were supposed to be in Taiwan for about 2 weeks, but because of the weather in Boston, we missed a connection in San Francisco and ended up staying there for three days.) For some reason I decided to buy several books in Chinese. It'll be interesting to see when and if I get around to reading them!

永不放棄：楊逵的抵抗、勞動與寫作, by 楊翠. 楊翠 (Yang Cui) is a granddaughter of 楊逵 (Yang Kui) and a professor of Chinese at National Donghua University in Hualien. I found out about this book through Facebook (so I guess Facebook is good for something!). I first heard about Yang Kui when I was interviewing a Tunghai alumnus from the 1960s who told me about his experience meeting Yang near 東海花園 (Tunghai Garden). He didn't know who Yang was, though, so he didn't talk to Yang. It would have been risky to talk to Yang, though, at that time because the police were still monitoring him. The alumnus said that if he had chatted with Yang at that time, he might never have been able to go abroad to study.

省道台一線的故事（全新增修版）, by 黃智偉. A former colleague from Tunghai sent me a photo of a bookstore she had visited that had a lot of books about Taiwan history, and this book caught my eye.

黃紀男泣血夢迴錄, 黃紀男口述黃玲珠執筆. Originally published in 1991, this book is out of print. 黃紀男 (N̂g Kí-lâm) was involved in the Taiwan Independence Movement and was jailed 3 times. He had some contact with George H. Kerr during the immediate postwar period, but mistakenly wrote that Kerr had been a CIA agent during his time in Taiwan as an English teacher (there was no CIA between 1937 and 1940, when Kerr was in Taiwan).

Hopefully I'll get a chance to read through some of these this year. I'm not making any new year's resolutions this time around, but I hope that I'll do some more reading this year (more than just student papers!). I'm currently skimming through 黃紀男泣血夢迴錄 in order to see what connection he had to Kerr and to the petition that was written post-228 to the US. 黃彰健 (Huang Zhangjian, no relation to 黃紀男) claimed in his 二二八事件真相考證稿 that 黃紀男 was William Huang was Pillar Huang was Peter Huang who wrote the petition to General Marshall. But I don't trust Huang Zhangjian, so I'm going to have to read through this myself...